An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us

Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Frontispiece

In the Valley of Bones

J. Edgar, Joe, and Me

State and Church

The Pope Speaks

Joy to My Youth

A Religious Education

Capers In Chains

Photos

Holy War

The Imposition

A Priest Forever

The Last Word

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright © 1996 by James Carroll

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carroll, James, date.

An American requiem : God, my father, and the war that came

between us / James Carroll,

p. cm.

ISBN 0-395-77926-x

ISBN 0-395-85993-x (pbk.)

1. Carroll, James, 1943–—Family. 2. Novelists—20th century—Family relationships. 3. Ex-priests, Catholic—United States—Family relationships. 4. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975—Protest movements—United States. 5. Fathers and sons—United States—Biography. 6. Catholics—United States—Biography. I. Title.

PS3553.A764Z464 1996 95-52125 CIP

813'.54—dc20

eISBN 978-0-547-52454-2

v2.0114

The author is grateful for permission to quote from the following: Lines from Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond, from Body Rags by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1965, 1966, 1967 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Lines from Vietnamese, from Growing into Love by X. J. Kennedy. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd. Copyright © 1969 by X. J. Kennedy. Lines from Death of Little Boys from Poems: 1922–1947 by Allen Tate. Copyright 1931, 1932, 1937, 1948 Charles Scribner’s Sons; renewed copyright © 1959, 1960 Allen Tate.

For Lexa, Lizzy and Pat

Frontispiece

MY FATHER: not until years later did I appreciate how commanding was his presence. As a boy, I was aware of the admiring glances he drew as he walked into the Officers’ Club, but I thought nothing of them. I used to see him in the corridors of the Pentagon, where I would go after school and then ride home with him. I sensed the regard people had for him, but I assumed that his warmth and goodness were common to everyone of his rank. I had no way of knowing how unlikely was the story of his success, nor had I any way to grasp the difference between him and the other Air Force generals. He was as tall as they, but looked more like a movie actor. I saw him stand at banquet tables as the speaker at Communion breakfasts, at sports team dinners, and, once, at a German-American Friendship Gala in Berlin. His voice was resonant and firm. He approved of laughter and could evoke it easily, though he never told jokes. His mode of public speaking had a touch of the preacher in it. He brought fervor to what he said, and an open display of one naked feeling: an unrestrained love of his country.

A fluent patriot, a man of power. Grace and authority were so much a part of his natural temperament that I did not mark them as such until they no longer characterized him. His relationship with his sons was formal—we addressed him as sir—but there was nothing stern in his nature. He never struck us. He never thumped the table until the pressures of the age made it impossible not to. We always knew he loved us. The problem was his absolute assumption that the existing social context, the frame within which he’d found his extraordinary success, was immutable. His belief in the world of hierarchy was total, and his sense of himself, as a father and as a general, depended on that world’s survival. Defending it was his one real passion, his vocational commitment, and his religious duty.

And yet. One early Sunday morning in winter, when I was perhaps twelve years old, he got up before dawn to drive me on my paper route. This was an unusual occurrence. I normally wrestled the papers onto my red wagon, even the thick Sunday editions. I hauled my own way in several cycles around our suburban neighborhood, Hollin Hills, a new subdivision in Alexandria, Virginia. But a savage storm had moved in the night before, and now the wind was howling. Sheets of rain and sleet battered the windows. We bundled up and waited inside the front door until my distributor arrived, late, in his panel truck. Then Dad and I hurried out to load my Washington Stars into the back seat of the Studebaker.

The windshield wipers kept getting stuck in the buildup of grainy ice, which we would scoop away as we returned from running the bulky papers up to the houses of my subscribers, Dad on his side of the street, me on mine. It was raw, unpleasant work, but that morning I loved it. Indeed, in my mind it was a game, a version of war, which we kids were always playing then. Those dashes from our car were sorties, I thought, bombing runs, commando raids. A stack of papers—artillery shells, mines, grenades—sat between us on the front seat. We would drive for fifty yards, jolt to a stop, snap into action. I would lean toward Dad, pointing through the fogged-up windows. I was the navigator, the bombardier. That one, that one. Then we’d each bolt from the car, ducking into the freezing rain, splashing up driveways and across soggy lawns, propping the papers inside storm doors, then dashing away as if the things were going to explode. We achieved a brilliant synchrony, a teamwork that overstamped everything that might ever separate us. Drive. Stop. Fold. Open the door. Duck. Dash. Return. Way to go! Sir!

‘If my father had been the commander of a two-man suicide mission, I’d have followed him—not out of any readiness to die but out of the absolute trustworthiness of what bound us at that moment. I would have sworn that time itself could not undo it. Neither principalities nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come . . . I was an altar boy over whose head Saint Paul usually sailed, but these words had lodged themselves in me. . . . nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us . . . Paul, of course, was talking about the love of God, but my only real faith then was in the good order of the world over which Dad presided. Him. Nothing would separate me from him. That morning was delicious for being just the two of us.

When we’d almost finished, something hideous happened. My father had run up to a house and dropped the paper and was running back toward the car when the door of the house swung open.

Hey, you! a voice boomed. Even in that wind I heard the threat in it. This was on the far side of Hollin Hills, where the newer, smaller houses were. My distributor had signed these people up. I didn’t know them. The voice was a man’s, and it was laced with authority. Get back here, goddammit!

My father stopped and stood with his back to the man, still facing me. I searched his eyes to see what was in them, but the distance between us, and the rain, made it impossible to see.

Get your ass back here, I said. Put my paper where it belongs.

I looked across and saw that Dad had dropped the paper under the overhang protruding from the lintel—dry enough, but not quite at the threshold. I thought of making the dash myself, to spare us all. But then I saw, on a low post beside my father, a sign with luminous letters on it. Dad was looking at it too. M. Sgt. John Smith. Master Sergeant, I realized at once. The man was military. An NCO was barking orders at a general. A drill instructor bellowing at recruits.

Again I looked for Dad’s eyes, and though it seemed I found them, I could read nothing of his reaction. Mine was stunned enough for both of us. Caught! was the feeling. Captured! Now they shoot us. I was frozen to a spot near the rear bumper of our car. Rain and sleet pelted my face, my soaked clothing, my slimy skin, my watery bones. A shudder coursed through me, a fever and a chill at once.

Get back here, goddammit!

My father’s stare made me feel sure this was my fault. I started to sprint toward the house, to retrieve the paper and apologize. But as I was about to pass Dad, he put his hand up, stopping me. He turned and, with that low humping movement—ducking gunfire?—he retraced his path up the sergeant’s driveway, dodging rivulets, scooting past a wheelbarrow and a mound of topsoil. Sergeant Smith’s car was off to the side, and now I saw the bumper sticker identifying it with Fort Belvoir, an Army post a few miles away.

The sergeant had remained in the shadow of the doorway, out of the weather. He held the storm door half open. I could see only his arm and the dark bulk of his body. He was a big man. I had collected at the house once or twice, but from his wife. In the short time they’d been on my route, they’d never complained. I took a step forward as Dad bent to pick up the newspaper. He brought it the two or three steps to the door, held it out, and the man took it, saying something I could not hear. Then Dad was running toward me again, pumping like a halfback. In the car, he called.

I scooted around to my side, and when he leapt onto the front seat so did I, as if we’d just pulled one off together. Our doors shut simultaneously. Dad dropped the car into gear, popped the clutch, and we lurched forward, away.

What did he say, Dad? I asked, but I was afraid of the answer.

He said . . . Dad looked at me, and I still could not read him. He said, ‘Don’t let it happen again, bub.’

What’d you say?

"No, sir! His face cracked open with pleasure, sheer triumph. Sir! Even I knew how senior NCOs hated it when stupid punk recruits addressed them as if they were officers. No, sir!" Dad repeated. Then we laughed and laughed, heads back. He slapped my leg. No, sir! I was swept up in a wave of gratitude, both that my father had not needed to pull rank on the bastard and that he’d found a way to prick him.

Our over-large reaction was about more than that, though, and now I know why. The order of the hierarchy, of the universe we shared, had just been upended. Years later, in literature class, I would learn that such reversal is the essence of comedy—and also of tragedy. But that morning, bound more tightly than before, my father and I found his near humiliation and his too sly but finally generous riposte only funny. Nothing would ever seem this funny to us again, certainly not the ordered world as eventually I upended it. But that morning, it was enough. We laughed until we got home, then found ourselves unable to explain to the others why. Which only made it better.

1

In the Valley of Bones

CATHOLICS CALLED IT Our Lady of Perpetual Help, but to the Jews and Protestants who also took turns worshiping there, it was just the chapel. Mary’s statue and the crucifix were mostly kept behind blue curtains—Air Force blue, the color of the carpeting, the needlepoint kneelers, and the pew cushions. The little white church with its steeple and clear glass Palladian windows could have been the pride of any New England town, but this was the base chapel at Boiling Air Force Base, on the east bank of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. A block to one side, hangars loomed above it, and up the hill on the other side a Georgian mansion, the Officers’ Club, dwarfed the small church—a reminder of what really mattered here.

On a Saturday in February 1969 more than two hundred people filed into the chapel. The statue of Mary and the wretched crucifix were on display. The paraphernalia of a Roman Catholic liturgy were laid out on the side table and altar—the cruets, the covered chalice, the beeswax candles, the oversize red missal, which the chaplain’s assistant would spell missile. The congregation included Air Force officers in uniform, since this event had the character of an official function. A number were generals who had come down from Generals’ Row, the ridge road along the upper slope of the base, where the vice chief, the inspector general, and members of the Air Staff lived. These were the chairborne commanders of Operation Rolling Thunder, an air war that by then had dropped more bomb tonnage on a peninsula in Asia than the Army Air Corps ever dropped on Germany.

The generals and their wives, easing down the center aisle, looked for their host and hostess, and found them already seated in the front pew. They were Lieutenant General and Mrs. Joseph F. Carroll—Joe and Mary. He was the founding director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the man in charge of counting the enemy and evaluating targets in Vietnam. Today he wore civvies, but with his steely hair, fixed gaze, and erect posture he looked like what he was. She, a staunch, chin-high Catholic woman, was nearly in possession of a lifelong Irish dream: she was the newly minted mother of a priest. But there was worry in her fingers as the beads she held fed through them. Her lips were moving.

A bell rang. The airman at the Hammond organ and a seminary choir began with a hymn, and the people stood, joining in with a set of coughs that moved through the chapel like a wind sent to rough up the chipper happiness of the seminarians. A line of altar boys entered from the sacristy in the rear, ambling into the center aisle, leading a procession of a dozen priests wearing stoles and albs, a pair of candle bearers, a thurifer, the surpliced master of ceremonies, and, last of all, the ordained priest come to celebrate his first Mass and preach his first anointed sermon. That new priest, with his primly folded hands and his close haircut and his polished black wingtips, was I.

A few minutes later, the Air Force chief of chaplains, Major General Edwin Chess, by church rank a monsignor, whom I had known since he accompanied Cardinal Spellman to our quarters for a Christmas visit at a base in Germany years before, stood at the microphone to introduce me. In a day when our society is so disjointed, he said to his fellow generals, it is a great joy to know that Father Carroll is on our side.

What? On whose side?

I was celebrating my first Mass here, as tradition required, because it was my parents’ parish, not mine. True, I had served as an altar boy in this chapel nearly a decade before. My brother Brian had been married at the sister chapel, across the Maryland hills at Andrews Air Force Base. A rotation of Air Force chaplains had been welcomed into our family like bachelor uncles. When I had entered the seminary after a year at Georgetown University—where I was named Outstanding Air Force ROTC Cadet—it had been with the specific intention of becoming an Air Force chaplain myself. General Chess had been my spiritual director.

And no wonder I’d harbored that ambition. Air bases were like sanctuaries to me. I loved the places—the air policemen saluting us at the gates, the sprawling hangars, the regular roar of airplanes, the friendly sergeants in the Base Exchange, the Base Ops snack bar, the mounded ammo dumps amid stretches of grass on which I’d played ball. After Hollin Hills, Air Force bases were a realm of mine. I grew up a prince, a would-be flyboy, absolutely on the side of everyone in blue. But now?

On our side—when had that unambiguous phrase ceased to describe my position? Perhaps beginning in November 1965 when, below my father’s third-floor window at the Pentagon, a thirty-one-year-old Quaker named Norman Morrison set himself on fire. It took a couple of years, but by October 21, 1967, I was standing on roughly the same spot below my father’s window. No self-immolator, I merely chanted antiwar slogans—and I dared do even that only because tens of thousands of others stood chanting with me. I was sure it would never occur to my father that I was out there, and I was careful not to isolate myself from the throng. He never saw me.

As a seminarian I had embraced as an ideal Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit priest and poet. Only months before my ordination, he and his brother led the infamous raid on the draft board offices in Catonsville, Maryland. On their side? Compared to the Berrigan witness, my anonymous participation in Washington’s massive antiwar demonstrations was the height of timidity. In secret I had taken the stainless-steel model B-52 bomber that was my prize for that ROTC award out to a ravine behind the seminary and hurled it, the napalm machine, into a fetid swamp. I remember its gleaming arc as my version of the gods’ dispelling in midair—their annihilation, not ours, as Wallace Stevens had it, yet it left us feeling that in a measure, we, too, had been annihilated. Those photographs of little slant-eyed people with melted chins and no eyelids and charred blue skin and fused fingers had given new meaning to the old word hit, as in hit of napalm.

I had had dreams about the war, about flying airplanes in it, but my puerile fantasy had become a nightmare. Once I dreamed of crashing a jet plane into my parents’ house on Generals’ Row. But it was all a secret, and not just from them. When, only a few months before, General Curtis LeMay, a 1968 vice presidential candidate, had put the most savage warmongering on display, I could not square my shame with the near worship I had felt for him as our next-door neighbor at Boiling in the early sixties. That was a secret too. I dreaded the thought that my fellow protesters might learn who my neighbors were, much less my father. In public, standing alone, I had never declared myself on the war. But what did it mean to be alone? I was two people, and considered independently, each of my selves seemed to have a coherence and integrity that were belied by the fact that I could not bring them together. For the longest time I could not speak.

And now? What to my father surely seemed a proper obeisance had become to me the secret cowardice of a magnum silentium. He had reason to take for granted the reliable decorum of my first priestly performance. But my mother, with her worrying fingers, had reason to be anxious, for she had learned never to trust the arrival of a dream, even if she could not quite imagine how it might shatter.

Despite my clerical draft exemption, or because of it, mounting the tidy pulpit of that pristine war church felt exactly like conscription. On our side? The chief chaplain’s words had hit me like a draft notice, and I felt naked as any inductee before my well-clothed brothers, friends, and neighbors; before a few of my fellow seminarians, hardly peaceniks; before beaming chaplains and generals; before my parents; before—here was the deepest feeling—the one-man congregation of my father. I could no more look at him than at God.

I remember looking at the other bright, uplifted faces. One was my brother Dennis, who before this year was out would be a draft fugitive. Another was my brother Brian, who before Dennis returned from exile abroad would be an FBI agent, catching fugitives like him. I remember the beveled edges of the wooden lectern inside my clutching fingers. The Scriptures in front of me were open to a text I had chosen myself, departing from the order of the liturgical cycle. And I remember:

The hand of Yahweh was laid on me, and he carried me away and set me down in the middle of a valley, a valley full of bones. He made me walk up and down among them. There were vast quantities of these bones on the ground the whole length of the valley; and they were quite dried up.

A mystical vision? The prophet Ezekiel in an epileptic trance? Yet news accounts not long before had described just such a scene in the valley below a besieged hilltop called Khe Sanh. Curtis LeMay had proposed using nuclear weapons to break the siege. Casualties had mounted. Ten thousand men had been killed in a matter of weeks, and that carnage was in my mind when I presumptuously chose Ezekiel’s text as the starting point of my first proclamation as a priest.

Dry bones: the metaphor rang in the air, a double-edged image of rebuke, cutting both ways, toward the literal Southeast Asian valleys of the dead and toward the realm of crushed hopes about which some of us had never dared to speak. Can these bones live? I now asked in my excursus, repeating Ezekiel’s refrain. Dried and burned by time, I said, and by desert wind, by the sun and most of all—I paused, knowing the offense it would be to use a word that tied the image to the real, the one word I must never use in this church, never use with them—by napalm.

It was as specific as I dared get—or as I needed to. Others in that congregation may not have felt the dead weight of that word, but I knew my father would, and so would the other generals. No one but opponents of the war referred to the indiscriminately dropped gelatinous gasoline that adheres to flesh and smolders indefinitely, turning death into torture or leaving wounds impossible to treat. Napalm embodied the perversion of the Air Force, how Off we go into the wild blue yonder had become the screeches of children. There was a sick silence in the chapel that only deepened when I repeated, Can these bones live? Only now the meaning was, Can they live after what you have done?

That was not a real question, of course, about the million Vietnamese whose bones the men in front of me had already scorched, or the more than twenty thousand Americans who had fallen by then. They were dead. And even a timid, metaphoric evocation of their corpses seemed an act of impudence. Can these bones live? I realized that I had unconsciously clenched my fist and raised it. All power to the people! Hell no, we won’t go! My fist upraised, as if I were Tommie Smith or John Carlos on the medal stand at the Mexico City Olympics, as if I were Bobby Seale. I recall my stupefaction, and now imagine my eyes going to that uplifted arm, draped in the ample folds of my first chasuble. Can these bones live?

I answered with Ezekiel’s affirmation of the power of Yahweh, the great wind breathing life into the fallen multitude—an image of the resurrection hope central to the faith of Christians. I reached for the spirit of uplift with which I had been trained to end sermons, and perhaps I thought I’d found it. Yes, we can live and love each other and be on the same side, no matter what. Peace, as LeMay’s SAC motto had it, is our profession. None of us is evil. God loves us all. Who am I to judge? Coming from one who’d just spit the word napalm at them, what crap this must have been to those generals.

Can these bones live? The answer to the question that day was no. We all knew it. In my mind now I look down at my parents, stiff in the front pew, my mother staring at the rosary beads in her lap, my father stupefied like me, meeting my eyes. He must have known that I had chosen this text. That violation of the liturgical order would have been enough to garner his disapproval. But a biblical battlefield? He must have known exactly what it meant. Bones? Vietnam? To ask the question was to answer it. My fist was clenched in my father’s face. Prophesy over these bones! Yahweh commanded. And, coward that I was, I did.

In the Catholic Church to which I was born, the theology of the priesthood affirmed that the effect on a man—always a man—of the sacrament of Orders was an ontological change, a transformation at the deepest level of one’s essence and existence. It is an absurdly anachronistic notion, I would say now, but that morning I was living proof of it. My ordination in New York the previous day by His Eminence Terence Cardinal Cooke—himself the military vicar, the warriors’ godfather—had given me an authority I never felt before. In my first sermon as a priest, it prompted me to break the great rule of the separation of Church and State, claiming an expertise not only about an abstract moral theology but about its most specific application—an expertise that my father, for one, had never granted me. I was not ordained for this, I would have said, sensing the wound that my timid reference had opened in him. But I can’t help it.

After Mass there was a reception at the Officers’ Club, and I was not the only one who noticed when my father’s fellow generals did not show up. They had no need to pretend, apparently, that my affirming peroration had undone the damage of my impudent reference to the war. My father stood rigidly beside me in the boycotted reception line. We were the same height, but his posture was better than mine and I thought of him as taller. Typical of me. Looking at it from his side, as I was conditioned to do, I saw that his presence next to me displayed a rather larger portion of parental loyalty than I deserved. I had already begun to see what I had done in referring to Vietnam not only as an act of smug self-indulgence but, conversely, as yet more proof of my cowardice. I had said enough to offend my father, and also enough to make me see what I should have said.

It wasn’t cowardice, I see now. What an unforgiving perception the young man I was had of himself, but he had yet to move through the full cycle of this story, had yet to move away, that is, from seeing the world as populated by cowards and heroes. The point is, despite my act of resistance, my father and I, even at that cold moment, were not unlike each other. And yet we would be separated for good now. These bones, I saw too late, were also the whole house of our relationship, and no, they would not live. There were two lasting effects of the sermon I gave on February 23, 1969. The first, and most painful, was the breach it caused between me and my father. For more than two years I had feared that if I dared hint at my rejection of the war, if I hinted at my not being on his side in the home-front war against armies led by the Berrigans or even Bobby Seale, he would neither understand nor forgive me. In prospect, to a young